FPWD: Trace Context

Trace Context

https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/WD-distributed-tracing-20181106/

Abstract

Distributed tracing is a set of tools and practices to monitor the health and reliability of a distributed application. A distributed application is an application that consists of multiple components that are deployed and operated separately. It is also known as micro-service.

The main concept behind distributed tracing is event correlation. Event correlation is a way to correlate events from one component to the events from another. It allows to find the cause-and-effect relationship between these events. For instance – find which user action in a browser caused a failure in the business logic layer.

To correlate events between components, these components need to exchange and store a piece of information called context. Typically context consists of an originating event identifier, an originating component identity and other event properties. Context has two parts. The first part is a trace context. Trace context consists of properties crucial for event correlation. The second part is correlation context. Correlation context carries user-defined properties. These properties may be helpful for correlation scenarios. But they are not required and components may choose to not carry or store them.

Unifying the format of distributed tracing context as well as aligning on semantic meaning of the values is the main objective of this working group. The goal is to share this with the community so that various tracing and diagnostics products can operate together.

Status of the Document

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at https://www.w3.org/TR/.

This is the First Public Working Draft. There are a few implementations of this protocol available. Experimental interoperability scenarios were run and have demonstrated promising results. The specification will be progressed into Candidate Recommendation stage after that, drafts for binary, AMQP and MQTT protocols will be written to make sure the concepts and structure defined in this specification can be ported to other protocols.

This document was published by the Distributed Tracing Working Group as a First Public Working Draft. This document is intended to become a W3C Recommendation.

GitHub Issues are preferred for discussion of this specification. Alternatively, you can send comments to our mailing list. Please send them to public-trace-context@w3.org (archives) with trace-context at the start of your email's subject.

Publication as a First Public Working Draft does not imply endorsement by the W3C Membership. This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.

This document was produced by a group operating under the W3C Patent Policy. W3C maintains a public list of any patent disclosures made in connection with the deliverables of the group; that page also includes instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) must disclose the information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.

This document is governed by the 1 February 2018 W3C Process Document.

Received on Tuesday, 6 November 2018 07:17:07 UTC